It's not like he needs the cash. But we don't think Joy, who joined Kleiner Perkins three years ago, as a partner in the once-storied venture-capital firm which funded Amazon.com and Google, among others, has much time to enjoy the place. Kleiner, like much of the venture-capital business, is struggling, especially with its bets on cleantech which have been battered by both the credit crunch and falling oil prices which make alternative energy sources less profitable. Better to unload it at any price — and invest in real estate closer to the office. As for Jackman, we figure the X-Men star simply knows a bargain when he sees one.

Arista — known as Arastra until it changed its name this week — is expected to announce on Thursday that it has recruited Jayshree Ullal as chief executive. Ms. Ullal left Cisco in May after leading the company’s $10 billion corporate switch business. In addition, the company will name a Stanford University professor, David R. Cheriton, as its chief scientist. Mr. Bechtolsheim and Mr. Cheriton are the sole investors in Arista, and they are known in Silicon Valley as men with a golden touch.

They decided to focus on switches that shuttle Internet traffic using the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard, which is many times faster than the Gigabit Ethernet standard that dominates data centers today.

Switches are the most common hardware used to funnel information between computing systems in a network. The key to Arista’s switches is the structure of the software that manages them.

A typical switch from Cisco is rich in features, but has up to 20 million lines of software code and may run on relatively slow processors. Arista breaks all of the major and minor tasks into their own modules that can be updated individually and uses more powerful chips to run it all.

Mr. Bechtolsheim said the design would let Arista make quick changes to products — even while they were running — and would also open an interface for customers to more easily add their own features.

“My iPhone runs better software than a typical switch,” Mr. Bechtolsheim said. "It is just mind-boggling that the cheapest consumer product has more robust software than what the Internet runs on."

(Photo by Brian Stubel)

Let me recap what David has done for MySQL. David is the reason MySQL is FOSS. Without David, MySQL wouldn’t be GPL (Monty originally planned a closed-source product). David is also the reason people associate MySQL primarily with Sweden and less so with Finland, since MySQL AB was founded in Uppsala to be close to David (and our third co-founder Allan Larsson).

If anyone finds yet another MySQL co-founder, please send him or her our way.

Playing on an early meme about home computers, Alan Alda shows how an Atari will make your kid a better typist than you. Oh, and it plays games too.

Apple flaunts its Y2K-proof products with a sad monologue from 2001's HAL 9000.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion teaches you how to get the color you want from your I-can't-decide girlfriend. Sexist? Not as much as the talk about Sarah Palin at Whole Foods this morning.

A clever Web page ad for Apple that ties two ad spots on the page together. John Hodgman's PC guy undermines the ads a bit by making me feel sympathetic for him.

Seinfeld's pointless but funny Superman ad for American Express's product warranty feature was probably what convinced Microsoft he could do the same for Windows. If the writers of the Microsoft/Seinfeld ad had created a similarly out-of-character character for Bill Gates, it might've worked.

Driving kids away from blogging once and for all. When blogs are safe for announcing corporate earning reports — when Mom and Dad drive an hour each way just to pull down a salary for clicking "Save" in Movable Type — you know they won't touch a blog, even if you paid them. Well, maybe if you paid them.

After [more than ten] years in Sun's Marketing organization, I am bidding you all a fond farewell today. It's been a great ride. Although I haven't always agreed with every decision made, I have always been impressed with the quality of people in marketing. Funny, smart, passionate, and adaptable. I can't begin to express my thanks for providing such a phenomenal work environment. I've learned a tremendous amount and enjoyed it along the way.

No question, this is a tough time as I've spent most of my adult life working for Sun, but I'm very optimistic and excited about what's next on the horizon for me.

I truly hope that Sun will be successful in the future (and not just because I still own a boat-load of stock), but because I am leaving lots of great friends here.

Best wishes to everyone staying and those who are leaving today,

In a blog post last week, Tim O'Reilly announced that VC arm O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, will be hosting an event in July called OATV Startup Camp, which bears more than a passing similarity to Sun's Startup Camp. Not only that, Sun has a trademark pending on the term 'Startup Camp'. So will O'Reilly be civil and pick a new name?

Young used his time on stage during the keynote to show off a 10-disc Blu-Ray project that included almost every song he'd ever recorded, in chronological order. Sun's role? In providing Sony the Java code that allows for interactive features on Blu-ray. Young said that while he'd been working on the project for 15 years, only now was the digital audio quality up to standard. Each track had visual accompaniment from the relevant era. When a recording from the compact disc era appeared, he joked "We took a giant dump at this point." He also mentioned that he was working to create a car that didn't require stops for refueling, which also has some tangential relationship to Java, showing off an American mid-century model he's entering in the automotive X-Prize challenge.

Interestingly enough, us bloggers with our hair-trigger deadlines were given first crack at asking questions of Young (and indulging in the complimentary fruit plate), while the print reporters with their leisurely deadlines had to wait outside. As we waited for Young and his entourage to arrive, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly showed off his Livescribe pen for recording audio in time with written notes to News.com editor-in-chief Dan Farber, who remarked sagely about the need for special Livescribe paper, "So they're selling the razors and the blades." But the two quickly went into fanboy mode when Young arrived, peppering the man with questions before anyone else could get a word in edgewise.

The car project, part of a documentary Young's working on with filmmaker Larry Johnson, a longtime collaborator, seems to be a bit of a lark. He wants to create a superefficient car that doesn't need to stop for gas or electricity, and he wants it to be heavy. While I might have gotten a C+ in college physics, it's enough to know that you can't run a Lincoln Continental on unicorns and rainbows. "It's very kooky. When you try to do something like this, people say you're nuts." Wonder why?

I mostly went on behalf of my father, who's pretty much a superfan (to the point where, besides the mutton-chop sideburns and dark glasses, he and Young seem to have identical fashion sense). My question had to do with the fact that my father had already bought Young's work on vinyl, then again on CD, and will now probably buy it all over again on Blu-ray in the fall. "I think it's the same as Microsoft selling the same applications every year with new bells and whistles." He then made this vinyl collector very happy by lambasting the quality of digital audio, and saying that he still records and edits everything in analog.

Young was at his best when he pierced through the Sun marketing hype of the morning. When O'Reilly asked how the musician felt about the "free" aspects of Sun's open-source efforts with Java, Young veered well of the "Keep on rockin' in a free world" tagline I assume Sun paid dearly for: "The free aspect... I think that's a word, that's a marketing thing." Touché.

The company then trotted out the likes of Ian freed, Amazon.com's VP on the Kindle project, and Rikko Sakaguchi, SVP at Sony Ericsson, to explain how their devices were using Java. A Sun software engineer and designer showed off Java-powered apps, such as the ConnectedLife widget which travels from Facebook to desktop client to mobile device. (He did not mention that Facebook has dropped support for Java.) Green announced that the latest build of the Java software was available today, and that the developers suite, OpenJDK, now supports popular Linux distributions Ubuntu and Red Hat, with a Fedora release within a month.

A software-emulated mobile device was shown running Google's Android — presumably the two companies have made nice. But beyond the OpenJDK announcement, nary a word was spoken about the enterprise market and if any role for Java in datacenter applications was mentioned, I missed it. I was listening for Green or CEO Jonathan Schwartz to say something, anything, about the company's quarterly earnings and new revenue streams. Instead, he talked about how the latest Java releases will be free and open-source.

I guess the company will make their coin providing support to the device manufacturers who use the JavaME mobile platform or the JavaFX suite of multimedia tools — competing with other application development environments such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Problem is, Sun's tools for content developers require a level of Java expertise well above that required by Adobe's easy-to-use Flash tools, and both Flash and Silverlight are also being licensed for free to device manufacturers. But hey, did we mention Neil Young?

When Sun reported $89 million in income on $3.2 billion in revenue last quarter — a 1 percent increase year-over-year — analysts wondered if the company would ever grow again. "What we need to see is if this company can ever grow again, and the jury is still out on that question," noted one analyst. Today's move should assuage some of those questions for now. Though it's unlikely as anything to change Sun founder Bill Joy's dismal views on the fate of humanity.

I eat to refuel. To him, it's an experience. ... I probably wouldn't remember where we went. You're wasting money on a good meal with me. With a skillet and a microwave, I can cook just about anything I want to eat. ... Son of a gun. I don't think that cheapskate has taken me out to dinner. That's why I hired him. He's cheap.

Oh man, YouTube is gonna die. Especially if all the Sun videos are this creepy.

"Wacky! Energizing! Educational! It's the best food in the cafeteria!" What is this VP talking about?

Coming soon to YouTube: Sun product videos [ZDNet]
John Fowler's YouTube Challenge [YouTube]

Caption this photo in the comments. (No comment account? Enter a new username and password and a perfect caption could win you a spot in the comment club.) Best caption wins a copy of "Stephanie's Ponytail."

It's a Shipping Container. No, It's a Data Center in a Box. [NY Times]

Right now, says Schwartz, Sun has to disclose this info through a conference call with investors or through a press release issued to newspapers. The SEC rules are supposed to ensure that the public can all equally access the info, but Schwartz figures the Internet is more public than a phone convo or an article in the Wall Street Journal.

And, well, who can argue with that? Maybe not even the SEC chair. So here's a toast to Jonathan Schwartz, who might soon make business history.

One Small Step for the Blogosphere... [Jonathan's Blog]

Sure, there are some mockably grandiose statements, like "Asking the question 'Why does Sun matter' is the equivalent of asking 'Why does the Internet matter?'" But there's also a cute story about Schwartz explaining Internet network clients to his five-year-old daughter.

All in all, this little chat isn't earth-shattering (at one point Schwartz seems to confuse increased phone-texting use with increased Java app use), but it's good for personal color, a way to see Schwartz "beyond the ponytail" and all. Scoble promises more such CEO interviews to come.

Jonathan Schwartz on why Sun Microsystems is relevant [ScobleShow]

In other words, he's ready to sell this puppy.

Sun's been shopping itself for a while. Everyone knows that, but no one knows who will buy. Apple? Google? Hewlett-Packard (snicker)? Whoever it is, if Doerr feels safe enough to let Sun go, he must have finally found someone to take it off his hands.

Next: Who will replace Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's interim CEO?

Longtime Sun director Doerr to step down [ZDNet]

The high-tech version of Gillette's marketing strategy of giving away the razors and selling the refills could be implemented at Sun Microsystems if CEO Jonathan Schwartz's plans for "Project Mercury" take hold.

No wonder Schwartz bugged General Motors to give its cars away as loss leaders for the OnStar service. "Schwartz, the guy with the give-away-the-Cadillac business model" is much sexier than "Schwartz, the guy with the give-away-the-Venus-Vibrance business model."

Sun May Give Away The Blades [InternetFinancialNews]

• Google + Apple = Gapple, also Gpple
• Sun Microsystems + Apple = Snapple
• Yahoo + Google = Yahoogle
• Yahoo + eBay = Yahweh or Heeb
• Google + Microsoft = Googlesoft
• Google + Amazon = Googlezon

It helps to think of the prefix company as the "top" in the relationship, and the suffix company as the "bottom."

Image by Chris Messina [Flickr]

As with Dvorak's best ideas, it's so crazy it just might work. For one, Schmidt doesn't need to do much day-to-day work at Google, thanks to hands-on management from co-presidents Larry and Sergey.

Speaking of Larry and Sergey, Schmidt's Google experience gave him a refresher course on managing a partnership of two dynamic, demanding personalities. Compare Apple's Steve Jobs to Sergey and Sun's Jon Schwartz to Larry, and Schmidt already has the Cliff Notes for this deal.

Finally, Schmidt knows Sun. He spent years there, rising to the post of Chief Technology Officer. The chance to jump back in the fray would be a great change from babysitting a pair of billionaires while they pimp out their jet. If Eric's really ready for action, he'll push the Apple board closer to that long-awaited merger.

Is an Apple-Sun merger in the works? [MarketWatch]

Sun paid last week for a life-size painted cutout of HP co-founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, one of five portraits of tech titans traveling thousands of miles in a zany, cross-country art project called "Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight."

An HP VP (sounds like a Segway) commented that it was a "cute stunt" but that paying for the art wouldn't be in line with the company's values.

Apparently, HP's values include getting smacked down like a bitch.

Sun Buys Hewlett and Packard Painting [SF Chronicle]
Photo: Acquiring Hewlett Packard's Legacy [Jonathan Schwartz's blog]

(Sun Microsystems' flacks pitched us on the following story, but only because they knew we love a good gang war.)

This summer, Bay Area artists sent life-size cutouts of Silicon Valley on a hitchhiking tour designed to end with glorious homecomings for all. But cutouts of HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were turned away at their own company's headquarters, according to one of the project's creators.

That artist's husband is an engineer for Sun. Sun and HP are kind of like rival gangs (the poncey finger-snapping, dancing kind, not the bust-some-caps-in-your-ass kind), and their last run-in ended with HP slapping its brand on Sun's cocktail napkins. So you'll forgive Sun for needing a little payback — and for turning this into a "fuck you" to HP's business decisions.

Sun Rescues Hewlett and Packard [Sun Blogs]
Where's Waldo meets Silicon Valley [SF Tech Chronicles]
The Adventures of Hewlett and Packard [YLEM.org]

I and a few other Silicon Valley leaders were honored to host the first visit ever for a British Prime Minister to Silicon Valley. And he fit right in (wardrobe aside, but he's a world leader after all, and asking him to dress down for Silicon Valley would be like asking Steve Jobs to skip blue jeans and a black shirt - morally objectionable to someone).

So Schwartz was wearing a T-shirt with a slogan, right? Or a polo shirt, maybe, with Dockers?

Hey wait, what? He was as dolled-up as Blair! The most Jon Schwartz can say is that he occasionally doesn't wear a tie.

Schwartz, babe, call us when Jobs sends you some jeans.

Lunch with Prime Minister Tony Blair... [Jonathan Schwartz's blog]
Photo: Sun Microsystems [Reuters]

"Jonathan is stylistically quite different from Scott—he's a little more directive."
"For instance, we can't just have a one-on-one meeting — Jonathan has to tie me to an Aeron chair and whip me with his ponytail. I'd complain, but it kind of feels good."

"Jonathan is kinder and gentler in some ways—"
"Okay, i should admit Scott did the same thing with a cat o' nine tails."

"—but less collegiate also."
"No cuddling."

"He makes hard choices with [CFO] Michael Lehman's support. Jonathan and Mike share an office for a number of reasons."
"Hint hint."

Selling Sun To Sun [Forbes]

Which is better: the glasses taking over his face, or his inflection when he says "these two giraffes"?

April Fools Joke [Google Video]

Sun is so short of money now, that for a recent Sun Data Centre conference that they held in Melbourne, Australia, they had their event organiser seek external sponsorship. Someone from HP stepped up and sponsored a dinner or something, which resulted in the attached napkins being used throughout the whole conference. Apparently the Sun customers thought it was great, especially watching the Sun reps running around trying to pick up the napkins all day.

Sun Microsystems lays off workers [BusinessWeek]
Earlier: "Ponytail" Schwartz chops off thousands of jobs this week (He didn't.) [Valleywag]

If the conference jesters were encouraged to speak up, instead of letting yes-men and weak devil's advocates dominate Q&A sessions, would boring one-sided conference panels turn into real discussions?

Of course not. That's not how a conference gets speakers to come back, and we snarkers are too passive-aggressive to ask anyway. But this is what the class clowns should have asked the speakers at this week's Supernova conference.

• To Sun CEO Jon Schwartz: "The host just said he hopes you're at the company for a long time. How long will four to five thousand Sun employees be at the company? Until before or after lunch?"
• To AT&T exec Eric Shepcaro, who just said, "Our strongest asset is security" (honestly): "Eric, do you mean 'Security, except when the NSA wants to look at your data'? Is that how security fits into today's announcement that customer data belongs to you and the NSA?"
• To IBM exec Linda Sanford: "When you had this values discussion you talked about, did that involve whether you'd work with Nazi Germany again?"
• To Craigslist founder Craig Newmark: "How are the birds in your backyard doing? Cool. See you at Reverie tomorrow? Cool."

Hoo boy, Web 2.0 just got dropped, albeit with a clever disclaimer that CMP and O'Reilly Media own the term. Liveblogging (did he just predict convergence?) will continue after the jump.

Yep, Schwartz says that in a few years, you'll get the same stuff on your phone, your laptop, your brain-embedded HUD...

Supernova host Kevin Werbach asks Schwartz about his earlier statement, "All CEOs should blog." Schwartz points out that a few years ago, CEOs didn't read their own e-mail or have cell phones. Being a CEO is all about communicating, he says, and blogging is a new part of that.

Schwartz says he isn't the best-read blogger at Sun. But he understands why Bill Gates doesn't blog — it would undermine the importance of other Microsoft bloggers. (Whereas everyone knows that while Gates knows his technology cold, Schwartz can be safely ignored while everyone reads the engineers' blogs.)

Schwartz says eBay has more searches per day than Google. O RLY Jon? Can someone get numbers on this?

When Jon Schwartz says "unFATHomably large," he sounds a bit like Bill from "Kill Bill."

"I hope you have your job for a long time," says Werbach. Don't count on it, dude.

Everything, EVERYTHING, will be networked and connected and running on phones and computers and Blu-Ray and PUPPIES AND KITTENS OH JOY. And Sun will make money off of it all, until it gives the money-making platform away free and makes money fixing it when it breaks.

Aaaaand we're wrapped up. Next: Craig Newmark, the teddy-bear founder of Craigslist.

And now we have an altogether better reason to attend the Supernova 2006 conference in San Fran: Schwartz speaks there Thursday morning. Cocktails on Valleywag's dime for anyone who asks him (in public) whether he'll fire thousands of people before or after lunch.

Seriously. Double the cocktails if we get it on video.

Sun CEO will announce thousands of layoffs this Thursday [ZDNet]

There are plenty of reasons that the press needs, if not a good hate-on, at least a swat. The St. Paul Pioneer Press demonstrates one reason — the press is easily amused — by calling ex-Sun CEO Scott McNealy (pictured here finding jokes on chests) "funny", "brash", and "outspoken" in the lede to a recap of his tepid talk at the U of Saint Thomas.

"Now Microsoft, it likes to say it shares, but if they said that here today to you, you'd be throwing things down at them," he said, glancing up at the people in the balcony of the college's new Schulze Hall in Minneapolis. "And IBM, what has it shared? Invoices?"

Cue the rimshot.

That rimshot line could be wry bored commentary if it weren't for the cheesy lede. As could the following:

"Give all 6 billion people a Dell computer — think of the global warming!" he said. "Minnesota would be three feet deep in water — it would be the land of one lake."

Rimshot.

If you have to simulate musical joke alerts in a news piece, just don't print the gags at all.

Potshots, rimshots at McNealy talk [Pioneer Press]

Sun demonstrated that commitment [to interoperability] on stage during Tuesday's keynote where a Microsoft employee and a Sun employee each had roses in their mouths and were dancing the tango.

The ceremony devolved when a Google employee wandered onstage, and the Sun and Microsoft employees, caught up in the rapture of their dance, symbolically beat him bloody with their thorny rose stems.

Microsoft and Sun prove it takes two to Tango [IT Business]

• Sun promises to make Java open source. It will be the loss leader for a lovely set of Sun steak knives. [VNUnet]
• Blue Security dies. USA Today publishes graph showing the Blue Frog mascot being slowly cooked. [Washington Post]
• "I wouldn't take that so literally." — Yahoo CFO Susan Decker, about projected revenue of $4.6 billion to $4.85 billion. Apparently those numbers were metaphorical. [CNN Money]
• Napster almost made money this quarter. Who'd have thought that an RIAA-approved walled garden piggybacking off the brand recognition of a stick-it-to-the-man filesharing network wouldn't be a cash cow? [CNET]
• Oh, looks like the Internet is just for child porn. At least on Orkut. [Bloomberg]